aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Monday, June 25, 2007
London mayor: US Ambassador is a “venal little crook”
Friends here are telling me about Bloomberg pushing his congestion pricing proposal, something they know I’ve long favored. They wonder if I’d like the provision that has it take effect below 86th St. I lived on 95th between Columbus and Amsterdam for twenty years; this would make my old neighborhood a parking nightmare.
Well, yeah, I’d draw the line at 96th Street! 
It was in that context that I read today that the U.S. is the biggest congestion pricing scofflaw in London. Our excuse? It’s a tax so we don’t have to pay. The mayor of London’s not buying that:
“The majority of missions pay the congestion charge on time and do not incur fines. We also wrote to all missions owing over £1,000 in fines urging them to settle their debts with Transport for London.”
The US embassy - along with many others - has refused to pay the congestion fee on the grounds that it is tax; and therefore diplomats are exempt from paying it.
It has led to stinging criticism from London mayor Ken Livingstone, who branded US ambassador Robert Tuttle a “venal little crook” for his refusal to pay.
We owe £1,484,765 in unpaid fines, over twice as much as second place Nigeria.
Via Cory Doctorow who points to what we learned analogously in NYC, “a country’s national corruption index is a good predictor of the likelihood that its UN diplomats will rack up unpaid parking fines.”
Evan & Sicko
Evan Almighty, Hollywood’s $200 million pander at the Christian market in which a faithless and stupid congressman turns into a reluctant ark builder and comes to believe in God only because God hammers him over the head with miracles, was a weekend box office disappointment.
The star instead? Fox says (!) it was Sicko, ”a smash hit:”
The documentary about the health care industry was sold out at all its “sneak” screenings in 43 locations around the country including Cleveland, Boston, Atlanta, and Detroit.
In New York, at the AMC Lincoln Square, where “Sicko” began an exclusive run on Friday, Moore’s funny and quite sad look at how Americans might benefit from universal health care sold out its entire run. The total box office at the theater was over $70,000 - possibly a record for an exclusive showing. [...]
On Friday night, Moore and one of his producers attended the 7:45 p.m. Lincoln Square screening, unobtrusively and out of sight of the audience. When the show ended, a standing ovation ensued, with cheering that culminated in Moore ultimately revealing he was there. The situation got so out of hand that the fire marshall came in to clear the theater.
Sunday, June 24, 2007
Supporting our vision
Pride news: Elizabeth Edwards Backs Gay Marriage
Elizabeth Edwards, the wife of Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards, kicked off San Francisco’s annual gay pride parade Sunday by splitting with her husband over support for legalized same-sex marriage.
“I don’t know why someone else’s marriage has anything to do with me,” Edwards said at a news conference before the parade. “I’m completely comfortable with gay marriage.”
In other pride news, Andrew Sullivan’s been there, done that (me too, here and here). Michael Demmons was in Piedmont Park (and watching Channel 11). The NY Grand Marshalls were a lesbian Rabbi and a Christian preacher. And Florida had its own tale of God, pride and preachers.
LATER: Atlanta Rev. Bradley Schmeling - who refused to resign from St. John’s Lutheran Church last year after telling his bishop that he was in a gay relationship - was grand marshal for Atlanta’s pride parade:
Members of his congregation marched behind the car carrying Schmeling, and other members stood along the parade route.
“To see the crowd respond so positively was wonderful,” said Barbara Arne, a St. John’s member. People stopped her after the parade “to say how wonderful it was to have so many churches supporting the gay community,” she said.
“I’m a little embarrassed by all the attention,” Schmeling said Saturday. “But I feel like it’s a chance for me to witness for a church that’s open, accepting and loving to everyone. So many churches have only harsh and negative words for gay and lesbian people.”
Schmelling was reluctantly defrocked by a committee that realized church rules left them no choice, but they did so in such a way as to open the door for change by suggesting that the church reconsider its rule on gay relationships. With that, attention now shifts to Chicago where the churchwide assembly meets in August. Roughly half of its agenda there will be taken up by lesbian and gay issues.
Condoms
Lots of these on the streets today…
NYC
A smooth flight on a crystal clear day had me on the Newark AirTrain in time for yesterday’s 4:15 NJTransit train to Penn Station. I dropped luggage at my host’s Village apartment, then we headed to Chelsea for dinner at the Rocking Horse Cafe. A favorite since the 1990s - when the Times says the “Rocking Horse was one of the most exciting Mexican restaurants in New York” - it’s different now but altogether as good as it ever was. We made our way through the crowd of gay revelers to get to our quiet(er) table in the rear.
Afterwards we headed uptown to see the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony perform a benefit concert tribute to Beethoven at Riverside Church. More specifically, we went to see friends singing in the chorus for the symphony’s performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. I think I remember seeing the Ninth performed live only once before - by the New York Philharmonic in Central Park years ago - and even that could be a phantom memory. Last night’s was an exuberant performance in a glorious setting and an altogether thrilling experience.
This morning it was breakfast in SoHo (the best Eggs Benedict I’ve had in years) and a visit to the Apple Store (which has no 15” MacBook Pros in stock - nor does the 5th Avenue store - and they don’t even know when they’ll be getting them in). Back at my temporary NYC home now, a roar just came from Fifth Avenue as the Pride Parade arrived in the village. I have to shower and get out there! I’ll add links to this post later. And hopefully have some interesting video from the day’s pride festivities.
Saturday, June 23, 2007
American-style Innovation
Ford has reintroduced the Taurus.
Yawn.
What makes it even worthy of my mention is the selling points: a bigger engine, a new grill, and a new ad campaign. Ford President Mark Fields said on the Today Show just now:
It’s very clear as we look at our lineup going forward that we have to have the right consistent marketing message.... The advantage now is that we have a nameplate that has a lot of awareness.
I’m not a car guy, but the sad shame appears to be that instead of innovating, Ford is diagnosing a marketing problem and simply renaming a car that’s been a market clunker. Ironically, the original Taurus was truly innovative:
The Taurus was a milestone design for both Ford and the entire American automotive industry, as well as a very influential vehicle in the marketplace, with Ford selling nearly 7.5 million examples during its 20 years of production - a longer bestselling run than the original Ford Model T. Between 1992 and 1996, the Taurus was the best-selling car in the United States, even prompting Honda to grow the US version of the Accord to a similar size. The Taurus eventually lost its best-seller status in 1997 to the Toyota Camry.
Many industry experts, including executives at Chrysler and even at Ford, believed that the Taurus was going to be a failure. They thought its design was too advanced for many customers during the eighties. This turned out not to be the case, as the Taurus became a best seller, thus making it a sleeper hit.
Bad to the last drop
San Fran’s Mayor Gavin Newsom is in the news again, this time for an executive order banning city departments from buying bottled water, citing the environmental impact of making, transporting and disposing of the bottles.
He’s right.
Though hardly anyone can detect a difference between tap and bottled water, still we buy it. At a cost of 250 to 10,000 times tap water, sales are growing faster than for carbonated soft drinks. There are no health or nutritional benefits from drinking bottled water over tap water and “tap water is more stringently monitored and tightly regulated than bottled water.”
That from an August 2005 NYTimes OpEd by Tom Stangage, Bad to the last drop, that wholly persuaded me:
Bottled water is undeniably more fashionable and portable than tap water. The practice of carrying a small bottle, pioneered by supermodels, has become commonplace. But despite its association with purity and cleanliness, bottled water is bad for the environment. It is shipped at vast expense from one part of the world to another, is then kept refrigerated before sale, and causes huge numbers of plastic bottles to go into landfills.
Of course, tap water is not so abundant in the developing world. And that is ultimately why I find the illogical enthusiasm for bottled water not simply peculiar, but distasteful. For those of us in the developed world, safe water is now so abundant that we can afford to shun the tap water under our noses, and drink bottled water instead: our choice of water has become a lifestyle option. For many people in the developing world, however, access to water remains a matter of life or death.
More than 2.6 billion people, or more than 40 percent of the world’s population, lack basic sanitation, and more than one billion people lack reliable access to safe drinking water. The World Health Organization estimates that 80 percent of all illness in the world is due to water-borne diseases, and that at any given time, around half of the people in the developing world are suffering from diseases associated with inadequate water or sanitation, which kill around five million people a year.
Widespread illness also makes countries less productive, more dependent on outside aid, and less able to lift themselves out of poverty. One of the main reasons girls do not go to school in many parts of the developing world is that they have to spend so much time fetching water from distant wells.
Clean water could be provided to everyone on earth for an outlay of $1.7 billion a year beyond current spending on water projects, according to the International Water Management Institute. Improving sanitation, which is just as important, would cost a further $9.3 billion per year. This is less than a quarter of global annual spending on bottled water.
I have no objections to people drinking bottled water in the developing world; it is often the only safe supply. But it would surely be better if they had access to safe tap water instead. The logical response, for those of us in the developed world, is to stop spending money on bottled water and to give the money to water charities.
Friday, June 22, 2007
Brits hate jargon
British pollsters YouGov questioned 2,091 adults:
LONDON (AFP) - “Blog”, “netiquette”, “cookie” and “wiki” have been voted among the most irritating words spawned by the Internet, according to the results of a poll published Thursday.
Topping the list of words most likely to make web users “wince, shudder or want to bang your head on the keyboard” was folksonomy, a term for a web classification system.
“Blogosphere”, the collective name for blogs or online journals, was second; “blog” itself was third; “netiquette”, or Internet etiquette, came fourth and “blook”, a book based on a blog, was fifth.
“Cookie”, a file sent to a user’s computer after they visit a website, came in ninth, while “wiki”, a collaborative website edited by its readers, was tenth.
Would it be any different on our side of the pond?
Taxing broadcasters to pay for elections
A new bill in congress would tax each television station’s gross advertising 2% to pay for presidential campaigns. The proposal is sponsored by Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Illinois), Sen. Arlen Specter (R., Pennsylvania), Sen. Russ Feingold (D., Wisconsin) and Sen. Barack Obama (D., Illinois).
“This would cost [broadcasters] a ton of money, but they make a fortune on candidates,” Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., told TV Week. “The broadcast industry does quite well. To ask them to play a part in this is quite reasonable.”
Debate - and commentary - should be interesting.
Isakson’s squalid little amendment
A NYTimes editorial today says our own Senator Johnny Isakson wants to add a squalid little amendment to the immigration bill to benefit a corporate constituent, Home Depot:
The amendment would prohibit state and local laws that required big home-improvement stores to provide rudimentary shelter for day laborers. There aren’t any such laws yet, but the City Council in Los Angeles, where Home Depot wants to open 13 stores, is considering one. Mr. Isakson’s pre-emptive strike would be an extraordinary intrusion of federal power into a local land-use matter.
Home Depot is a magnet for day laborers. Small contractors and homeowners load up on lumber, drywall and buckets of screws, and then grab a crew. Communities have struggled to deal with these often-untidy labor bazaars where looking for work can be hard to distinguish from loitering.
The combative approach, with anti-loitering laws and police harassment, seldom works and has been overturned repeatedly in the courts. The Los Angeles City Council is considering something more constructive, an ordinance that would charge big retail chains that attract day laborers - Home Depot, essentially - about $200,000 per store to provide a bare-bones space with shade, benches and toilets, to bring some order, cleanliness and safety to the daily mixing of men and trucks.
The ordinance treats day labor as a measurable and inevitable effect of Home Depot’s buy-in-bulk business. Just as stores must obtain conditional-use permits, operate at certain hours and install lights and signs to mitigate traffic and other problems they cause, Home Depot would have to help make its stores safer and less unsightly. But after more than two years of discussions with Home Depot, council members were stunned to learn that the company’s backdoor lobbying had gotten Mr. Isakson’s proposal onto the short list of Republican amendments for the Senate’s climactic debate next week.
RELATED: more on Georgia companies and immigration reform here.
Thursday, June 21, 2007
The decline of the Pride Parade
On Sunday, June 24, organizers of New York City’s Gay Pride Parade expect a throng of one million people to line Fifth Avenue all the way down to the Christopher Street pier to march and watch from the sidelines.
Nick Shapland, a tall, well-tanned and skinny 22-year-old with carefully tousled brown hair, won’t be one of them.
“Gay Pride is boring,” said the self-described poet and resident of Williamsburg.
The Observer story is that the affluent gays are staying away but the quotes all sound familiar to me. If the financial picture is truly “bleak” maybe Heritage of Pride, the non-profit, has grown too big. It wouldn’t be the first time. The dance on the pier has always funded the event, the rally that kicks off the week has never been big or all that interesting and I don’t care that the street fair’s been canceled - how many Souvlakis and gay flags can one person buy?
When I was young I agreed with Nick. I spent my summers on Fire Island and Pride Parades were of little interest to me. Sometime in my thirties I began to enjoy them as festive gay holiday celebrations. Like Halloween, but in summer. I remained fairly jaded about it but stayed in town every year and meandered through. As it happens, I’ll be doing that this Sunday; and I’m happy for it.
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Hillary’s Sopranos spoof
Via The Moderate Voice, “This Hillary Clinton video spoofing the last scene of The Sopranos is a masterful use of American culture. Can you spot the real cast member from The Sopranos?”
Xanadu on Broadway
I’m supposed to see it while in town next week. James Wolcott:
I loved Mamma Mia! And I loved Xanadu, as did the audience, and I loved the audience for loving Xanadu.
It was like taking Ecstasy in Broadway ticket form.
Our love glinted and radiated and swirled like the reflections of the mirrored disco ball that crowned the climax of the show’s pagan revels.
Ahh, the 80s...
Giuliani: strike 2! UPDATED: strike 3?
In the brouhaha over Giuliani’s no-show bowing out of the Iraq Study Group, one point in The Carpetbagger Report’s timeline counts for 2 strikes - one for putting his money-making speaking gigs before public service, and one for who he was here helping:
* The first ISG plenary session was on April 11. Giuliani didn’t show up; he was giving a $100,000 speech in Atlanta, and was helping [disgraced Georgia loser] Ralph Reed raise campaign funds.
LATER: Evidently I misspoke. There is no brouhaha:
Barack Obama has a researcher who mentioned “Punjab” in a stupid memo and the media obsessed over it for five days. The AP ran multiple stories about it, and every network reported on it in some length.
But Rudy Giuliani blows off the Iraq Study Group to cash in on his celebrity, is forced to resign, and the vast majority of news outlets don’t even lift an eyebrow.
Well then, maybe this will get their attention:
South Carolina Treasurer Thomas Ravenel, a former real estate developer who became a rising political star after his election last year, was indicted Tuesday on federal cocaine charges.
Ravenel is also the state chairman for former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign.
Who’s the sleeping giant now?
The other day on All Things Considered, Michel Norris asked Micheline Maynard, NYTimes Detroit bureau chief, about auto makers’ claims that they can’t possibly meet higher fuel efficiency standards:
Ms. MICHELINE MAYNARD: I actually don’t think it is true, Michele, and I think the issue here is not just an issue of technology, it’s an issue of marketing. Over the last 15 years or so, Detroit companies made billions of dollars in profit selling SUVs and pickup trucks. And at that time, gasoline was cheap, gasoline in many parts of the country was under $2 a gallon and people bought millions and millions of these big vehicles. In fact, people said, you know, this is what Detroit wants us to buy, this is what we’ll buy.
NORRIS: You’re saying it’s more of a marketing challenge than a matter of science or design.
Ms. MAYNARD: I really do think that it is, because these carmakers compete in places like Europe and in China. And fuel economy standards in those places are significantly higher, even higher than the Senate legislation that’s under discussion right now. And they managed to meet them and they managed to compete in those markets… And in China, the market is evolving, but, you know, even China has higher fuel economy standards than the United States. And they’ve only had fuel economy standards for a couple of years.
200 votes
Democrat James Marlow appears to be out of the July 17 run-off that will choose a replacement for the late Charlie Norwood. Norwood’s death in February after fighting cancer and lung disease left northeast Georgia’s 10th District House seat up for grabs.
Marlow, a Blue Dog in a Red State running in a largely rural district, looks to have lost his shot at the run-off by a mere 200 votes. These were the numbers at midnight:
U.S. Representative, District 10
96% of precincts reporting
Paul Broun 11,203 20.7%
Bill Greene 1,640 3.0%
Mark Myers 388 0.7%
Nate Pulliam 926 1.7%
Erik M. Underwood 394 0.7%
Jim Whitehead 23,570 43.5%
Denise Freeman 2,574 4.7%
James Marlow 11,016 20.3%
Evita Paschall 1,790 3.3%
Jim Sendelbach 725 1.3%
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Matt Towery on the letter of the law
Matt Towery wrote the law which was subsequently used to lock Genarlow Wilson up for 10 years for the crime of engaging in consensual sex with a 15 year-old girl when he was just 17 himself. Towery has objected to the prosecution before, he does so again today in Human Events:
Now a superior court judge has ordered Wilson released. The judge determined that the original sentence was “cruel and unusual punishment.” He’s right.
But the district attorney and others fight on. After all, they believe, the letter of the law must be followed.
Well, here’s a letter-of-the-law thought of my own: In 1988, when actor Rob Lowe was in Atlanta and filmed a sex act with an allegedly underage girl, federal officials warned local television stations that if they were to view the tape themselves, much less broadcast it, they would be considered in possession of and the distributors of child pornography.
It appears the district attorney and the legislators who refuse to recognize the original intent of my legislation—not to lock up kids for years for having consensual sex—have lucked out. Federal prosecutors clearly are using reasonable, and I believe correct, prosecutorial discretion in allowing these lawyers and lawmakers to distribute and view this highly prejudicial tape.
But the fact remains that federal law would define this tape as child pornography, with no exceptions provided for legislators or lobbyists. It’s too bad everyone seems so hell-bent to carry out “the letter of the law” that has imprisoned Genarlow Wilson, while enjoying reasonable prosecutorial discretion in the interpretation of laws regarding their own actions.
LATER: Maureen Downey, for the AJC editorial board, points out another letter-of-the-law inconsistency, “Factually, all the teenagers at the party who were drinking and smoking pot - girls and boys alike - broke the law. Yet McDade chose not to prosecute the girls for drinking or drug use. Such a decision was well within his discretion.”
Meanwhile, Markel Hutchins is at it again. I stand by my call for a new, re-imagined Civil Rights movement, and my observation that Hutchins doesn’t even come close to it.
Undersung Hero: Dr. Evelyn Hooker
As I reflect on the “ex-gay” evolution, I remember that as a runaway still in Harrisburg, PA in 1973, I went to a psychiatry clinic and cried, “I’m a homosexual, please fix me.” The psychiatrist answered, “Why do you think you need fixing?”
Dumb luck Good fortune had me sitting with a founder of New York City’s Identity House, an organization set up in 1971 to find the few therapists who knew even then that homosexuality was a normal, healthy human expression, not a “neurotic adaptation.”
Recently This American Life reran a January 2002 episode that told the story of how the American Psychiatric Association decided in 1973 - the very same year that I cried in that Pennsylvania psychiatrist’s office - that homosexuality was no longer a mental illness. 
Entitled 81 Words I was moved to transcribe this section, on the pioneering work of Dr. Evelyn Hooker:
[35:34] ...Until Evelyn Hooker met Sam From. Evelyn was a psychologist at UCLA and Sam was her student. He was also a homosexual. They started spending time together in the mid 1940s and Sam introduced Evelyn to his group of friends most of whom, like Sam, were gay.
Now, as I said, everyone in this group was homosexual but curiously, none was in therapy. They were all well-adjusted young men who utterly failed to conform to the traditional psychiatric image of the tortured, disturbed homosexual.
This, naturally, got Evelyn thinking.
Now, prior to Evelyn Hooker, all of the research on homosexuality - all of it - was done on people who were already under serious psychiatric treatment. Let me repeat that: In the history of psychiatric research, no one had every conducted a study on a homosexual population that wasn’t either in therapy, in prison, a mental hospital, or the disciplinary barracks off the armed services.
Evelyn thought about this and decided that this kind of research was distorting psychiatry’s conclusions about homosexual populations. To test her theory, Evelyn came up with an experiment. Through her former student she located 30 homosexuals who had never sought therapy in their lives and matched those homosexuals with a group of heterosexuals of comparable age, IQ and education.
Evelyn then put both groups through a battery of psychological tests including a Rorschach Test, the famous ink-blot test. After disguising her subjects, Evelyn gave the results to three experienced psychiatrists and asked them to identify the homosexuals. She figured that if homosexuals were inherently pathological, the psychiatrists would be able to pick them out easily. But the judges were completely unable to distinguish the homos from the hets.
Read the rest of "Undersung Hero: Dr. Evelyn Hooker" in the extended entry.
Good luck Larry!
Lawrence Lessig, with a nod to Obama and Gore and an anonymous friend, is devoting himself to something new:
I have decided to shift my academic work, and soon, my activism, away from the issues that have consumed me for the last 10 years, towards a new set of issues: Namely, these. “Corruption” as I’ve defined it elsewhere will be the focus of my work. For at least the next 10 years, it is the problem I will try to help solve.
I do this with no illusions. I am 99.9% confident that the problem I turn to will continue exist when this 10 year term is over. But the certainty of failure is sometimes a reason to try. That’s true in this case.
Nor do I believe I have any magic bullet. Indeed, I am beginner. A significant chunk of the next ten years will be spent reading and studying the work of others. My hope is to build upon their work; I don’t pretend to come with a revolution pre-baked.
Instead, what I come with is a desire to devote as much energy to these issues of “corruption” as I’ve devoted to the issues of network and IP sanity. This is a shift not to an easier project, but a different project. It is a decision to give up my work in a place some consider me an expert to begin work in a place where I am nothing more than a beginner.
He’s not leaving Creative Commons, or the iCommons Project, but says that “I have come to believe that until a more fundamental problem is fixed, ‘the movement’ can’t succeed.” I look forward to following his new work.
“Ex-Gay” no more
Alan Chambers directs Exodus International, widely described as the nation’s largest ex-gay ministry. But when he addresses the group’s Freedom Conference at Concordia University in Irvine this month, Chambers won’t celebrate successful “ex-gays.”
Truth is, he’s not sure he’s ever met one.
With years of therapy, Chambers says, he has mostly conquered his own attraction to men; he’s a husband and a father, and he identifies as straight. But lately, he’s come to resent the term “ex-gay”: It’s too neat, implying a clean break with the past, when he still struggles at times with homosexual temptation. “By no means would we ever say change can be sudden or complete,” Chambers said.
His personal denunciation of the term “ex-gay” - his organization has yet to follow suit - is just one example of shifting ground in the polarizing debate on homosexuality.
NY Assembly To Approve Gay Marriage
After much debate and wrangling, the Democrat-led Assembly as early as today is set to approve legislation legalizing same-sex marriage, handing gay rights advocates in the Empire State a major symbolic victory.
The speaker of the Assembly, Sheldon Silver, who represents a district in Lower Manhattan, agreed to put the bill up for a floor vote this week after his staff concluded that it had more the minimum 76 votes to pass the chamber. Still, some lawmakers said they expected some lawmakers to change their mind.
It would be the first time that a legislative chamber in New York has approved gay marriage and the second time that a legislative body in America has passed such a law.
With a Republican-led Senate, the law won’t be changing anytime soon. Good news nonetheless.
Homophobe Surgeon General nominee?
Chronologically speaking, James Holsinger’s objectionable behavior predates these later, more tolerant views:
Phyllis Nash, a professor of behavioral medicine, paints a reassuring portrait of the Holsinger she worked with at the University of Kentucky for nine years. In the late 1990s, she says, Holsinger helped a gay university lawyer and his partner cope with terminal cancer. “The morning after he was diagnosed, Dr. Holsinger was there in his living room with him and his partner, offering support and guidance and counsel.”
Later, Holsinger helped a lesbian employee of the university become a mother. “She wanted to have a baby, and Dr. Holsinger intervened and helped her to a sperm bank,” says Nash, adding that the woman told her the story.
Then in 2002, several Kentucky lawmakers went into a tizzy because the university medical center intended to host a panel on lesbian health. Nash alerted Holsinger, the center’s chancellor.
“He was unflinching,” she says. “He said, ‘We have an absolute responsibility to help health care practitioners meet the health care needs of lesbian patients.’” The panel met.
A man’s views can change over a decade. In fact, we who work for social change hope they do. I’d rather reward change than punish past behavior. But in politics the story’s more complex. The confirmation hearings will be interesting.
Via Pam Spaulding, who quotes Former U.S. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders:
“It would be very difficult for me to feel that this is the person that we should be confirming in this day and time with all the problems we have, related to sexual health...I think as the nation’s chief health educator we need to know what he would do to help America evolve into a sexually healthy nation. As far as I’m concerned his views on homosexuality should not matter, but how he uses those views to educate and promote attitudes and feelings in our country should matter.” (More.)
Monday, June 18, 2007
Student accuses teacher of plagiarism
Passing off someone’s work as your own is a cardinal sin in college research. Students can be expelled. Professional reputations can be wrecked. While student plagiarism grabs headlines, allegations against teachers happen more than people realize, experts say. Because students rarely fight back, most accusations fade in the grumbling over beers after class.
This time, though, the student is suing.
Scheduled for trial this summer in Anoka County, Swenson’s lawsuit against Bender may offer an unvarnished look at who controls ideas in the give-and-take of college research. It also may open a window on the complex ties between teachers and students who need a mentor’s help and influence - and who understand they are unlikely to get the benefit of the doubt.
The school in question, Minneapolis based Capella, is a “for-profit, online university;” the teacher in question also received her doctorate from Capella. It gets worse. The student and teacher never met in person. The student’s unpublished work was made available on the teachers website for free.
The teacher denies the whole thing and has some evidence to support her. It’s a mess.
Czech mushroom cloud TV prank
Like many European TV channels the state-owned CT2 broadcasts live panorama / weather streams from popular recreation areas in its morning programme, fully automated 30 second pans per site with music in the background. Initiative Ztohoven, a collective around Roman Tyc, somehow managed to inject a pre-recorded pan with a sudden atomic explosion in the midst of a beautiful countryside. No word how they did it, assume they tricked the cabling on the unmanned camera site. Tyc also replaced traffic light icons in Prague with illustrations of drunk, pissing or ranting figures a few months ago.
